Rigid body attitude synchronization with communication delays

The paper addresses the cooperative attitude synchronization problem of multiple rigid bodies in the presence of communication delays and without angular velocity measurements. First, we present a solution to the leaderless and leader-follower problems in the case of time-varying communication delays and undirected communication topology. Next, we present an attitude synchronization scheme for the leaderless problem, under a directed graph topology, in the presence of constant communication delays. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes, simulation results of a scenario of four rigid bodies are provided.

I. Introduction

We consider the cooperative attitude synchronization problem of multiple rigid bodies. The objective is to drive a team of rigid bodies to synchronize their orientations (attitudes) to the same final orientation. This problem has recently gained an increased interest in applications related to spacecraft formations. Several attitude synchronization schemes have been reported in the literature, see for example [1]–[4] in the full state information case, and [5]–[7], in the case where the angular velocities are not available for feedback. In these papers, the interconnection topology plays a central role, however, communication delays that are inherently present in transmission systems have not been considered.